Tuesday, 10 December 2013

Feast your eyes on this vision of beauty, Wake lovers! It comes from The Book of Kells, which you can see in the Treasury of Trinity College, Dublin. Trinity College has also made an amazing online version, which allows you to zoom in on details.

The text from Matthew.1.18, says 'XPI h generatio' (an abbreviated version of 'Christi autem generatio sic erat' which means Now the birth of Jesus Christ was like this)Joyce loved this book, and owned a volume of reproductions, with a description by Sir Edward Sullivan, published in 1914. He also sent a copy
to his patroness, Harriet Shaw Weaver, as her 1922 Christmas present.

Joyce told his friend Arthur Power what the book meant to him:

In all the places
I have been to, Rome, Zurich, Trieste, I have taken it about with me, and have
pored over its workmanship for hours. It is the most purely Irish thing we
have, and some of the big initial letters which swing right across the page
have the essential quality of a chapter of Ulysses.
Indeed, you can compare much of my work to the intricate illuminations. I would
like it to be possible to pick up any page of my book and know at once what
book it is.James Joyce to
Arthur Power (from an interview quoted by Ellmann, p.545)
Although Joyce called the book 'purely Irish', similar gospels were being produced in Wales, Scotland and Northumbria, whose monasteries had close links with the Irish Church. The style of decoration is also not pure but a fusion of Celtic, Pictish, Anglo-Saxon, Mediterranean and eastern influences.

The 'Carpet Page' from the Book of Durrow

Scholars call these books 'Insular', because they were produced in islands off the west coast of the European continent. The earliest is the seventh century Book of Durrow, which is also in Trinity College. Another great example, the Lindisfarne Gospels, from around 700 CE, is displayed in the British Library. The Book of Kells, dating from around 800 CE, is one of the last great works of the tradition. Its decoration is so rich and varied that it's like an encyclopedia of Insular styles.The Book is named after Kells, in Ireland, but there is an old tradition linking it with the monastery of Iona. The first record of the book, in the eleventh century, calls it the 'great Gospel of Columkille.' Saint Columba, or Columkille, founded the monastery of Iona. He makes lots of appearances in Finnegans Wake.The book may have found its way to Kells following the Viking raids on Iona, when the surviving monks fled the island. Though we think of Joyce as the most modern of the modernists, he told Arthur Power that he saw himself as writing in a medieval tradition:I remember once standing in the gardens beside Notre-Dame and looking up at its roofs, their amazing complication — plane overlapping plane, angle countering angle, the numerous traversing gutters and roundels. In comparison, classical buildings always seem to me to be over-simple and lacking in mystery. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about present-day thought in my opinion is its return to medievalism....There is an old church I know of in Les Halles, a black foliated building with flying buttresses spread out like the legs of a spider, and as you walk past it you see the huge cobwebs hanging in its crevices, and more than
anything else I know of it reminds me of my own writings, so that I
feel that if I had lived in the fourteenth or fifteenth century I should
have been much more appreciated....And in my opinion one of the most
interesting things about Ireland is that we are still a medieval people, and that Dublin is still a medieval
city. I know that when I used to frequent the pubs around Christ Church
I was always reminded of those medieval taverns in which the sacred and the obscene rub shoulders...Joyce to Arthur Power, quoted inConversations with James Joyce.

The sacred and profane also rub shoulders in The Book of Kells. There are small comical illustrations, like this cat chasing a rat which has stolen a communion wafer.

I wonder if Joyce's 'black foliated church' was St Eustache in Les Halles (right). It's gleaming white now, but would have looked black in Joyce's day.In Finnegans Wake, Shaun says of Shem the Penman (Joyce), 'He's weird, I tell you, andmiddayevil down to his vegetable soul.' (423.27)Shem is also described as 'making believe to read his usylessly unreadable Blue Book of Eccles' (179.26), where Ulysses is identified with The Book of Kells. Eccles is the street where Leopold Bloom lives in the book. Ulysses had a blue cover and aBlue Book was an almanac, or compilation of statistics. Stephen Gwynn's savage review in the Manchester Guardian summed it up as 'Seven hundred pages of a tome like a Blue-book are occupied with the events and sensations in one day of a renegade Jew' (Joyce never forgot or forgave a bad review).You can see Joyce's medievalism in the way he structured Ulysses using colours, organs, symbols etc, as shown in the elaborate schema he produced for Stuart Gilbert and Carlo Linati. Dante would have felt at home with this way of writing a book.Joyce was in a medieval frame of mind when he began writing Finnegans Wake. The early sketches were all based on Irish medieval myths and history - King Roderick O'Conor, St Patrick and the Druid, Tristan and Isolde, The Annals of the Four Masters and St Kevin. Most medieval in style is the St Kevin piece, which is structured according to ecclesiastical and angelical
hierarchies, liturgical colours, canonical hours, gifts of the Holy Spirit, and
the seven sacraments. Fweet describes its pattern as 'nine concentric circles, superimposed with two crosses, one of space (ascending angels and descending clergy crossing at lines 24-5), one of time (forward hours and backward sacraments crossing at lines 30-31)'On pages 13-14 of the Wake, Joyce gives us a look at some medieval annals of Dublin. A gap in the chronicle is explained:Somewhere, parently, in the ginnandgo gap between antediluvious and annadominant the copyist must have fled with his
scroll. The billy flood rose or an elk charged him or the sultrup
worldwright from the excelsissimost empyrean (bolt, in sum)
earthspake or the Dannamen gallous banged pan the bliddy duran. A scribicide then and there is led off under old’s code with
some fine covered by six marks or ninepins in metalmen for the
sake of his labour’s dross... Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson, in The Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944), argued that the inspiration for this passage was Sullivan's description of the unfinished opening page of Matthew's Gospel, with the text 'Liber
generationis' ('The book of the genealogy' of Jesus Christ).

Here's Sullivan's description:'The rudely-drawn figure standing in the lower
left-hand corner is said to represent the Evangelist. The smaller and much more
naturally drawn figure at the top may also be intended for him. The difference
of execution in the two cases would, I suggest, almost justify the conclusion
that the larger figure was a later addition in order to fill a space left
vacant when the original artist had touched the Manuscript for the last time. I think, too, that we can almost
see from the illumination itself the very place where he was hurried from his
work.'

'There are many unfinished portions in the whole page; for instance, the
small face to the left of the upper limb of the L, the piece of the border of
the same limb just above and to the right of the face, and possibly the space into
which the right elbow of the upper figure projects.'

'But more noticeable than
all these is the unfinished condition of the intertwined letters ER in the
circle which forms the lower portion of the antique and curiously formed B. The
dark line surrounding the red E is only half completed. The interruption of so
very simple a feature of the work seems to tell a tale of perhaps even tragic
significance.'Joyce also parodies Sullivan at length in Finnegans Wake Book One, Chapter 5, which he called 'The Hen'. J.S.Atherton has a good description of this chapter,in which a hen, Belinda of the Dorans, scratches a letter out of a 'midden' or 'mudmound':This midden is a symbol, elaborated later, for the inhabited world in which men have left so many traces. The letter stands as a symbol for all attempts at written communication including all other letters, all the world's literature, the Book of Kells, all manuscripts, all the sacred books of the world, and also Finnegans Wake itself. One reason why The Book of Kells is included here is that it was once 'stolen by night...and found after a lapse of some months, concealed under sods' (Sullivan) The Books at the Wake p62-3

Literature discovered in a rubbish heap reminds me of
Oxyrhynchus in Egypt - vast amounts of papyrus has been excavated from
the dumps here, since
1896. But I can't find any specific reference to this in the Wake.

From Vivien Igoe's James Joyce's Dublin Houses

Joyce's dour brother, Stanislaus (a model for Shaun in the Wake) has a story of the younger Joyce children finding two books in the ashpit of their house in Fairview (right). The children called these the 'ashpit books':

One was a song-book, the first pages of which were missing. It contained a large and miscellaneous collection of classical and traditional songs, popular ballads and many so-called comic songs, the humour of which always remained a mystery to me. The other was a closely and badly printed collated edition of the four gospels in a red cloth cover...My Brother's Keeper, p112

The document found in the Finnegans Wake dump originated as an everyday letter from an Irish family in Boston to relatives back home in Dublin. Over time, it has been transformed by 'heated residence in the heart of the orangeflavoured mudmound' (111.33), taking on a life of its own (like Finnegans Wake). It's compared to a melting photographic negative which, as PQ writes in his blog, makes the discovery of photographic slides in Joyce's own ashpit an amazing synchronicity.

Here's part of Joyce's great description of its appearance, which goes on for four and a half pages:

Look at this prepronominal
funferal, engraved and retouched and edgewiped and pudden-padded, very like a whale’s egg farced with pemmican, as were it
sentenced to be nuzzled over a full trillion times for ever and a
night till his noddle sink or swim by that ideal reader suffering
from an ideal insomnia: all those red raddled obeli cayennepeppercast over the text, calling unnecessary attention to errors,
omissions, repetitions and misalignments... 120.09-16

These 'red raddled obeli' come from Sullivan's text:

One important instance of correction is to be found on fol. 219 R.,
where the text of the preceding page, fol. 218 V., has been erroneously
repeated. Attention is drawn to the error by four obeli in red, running down
the middle of the page between the lines, and others round the margins, and red
lines about the corners.

Of red hæmatite of an earthy nature, such as is termed raddle, there is a plentiful supply in the County Antrim

You can see these obeli, which look like crosses, if you go to folio 218.v. in the online version. Joyce's whole description is modelled on Sullivan's, which begins like this:

Its weird and commanding beauty; its subdued and goldless colouring; the baffling intricacy of its fearless designs; the clean,
unwavering sweep of rounded spiral; the creeping undulations of
serpentine forms, that writhe in artistic profusion throughout the mazes
of its decorations; the strong and legible minuscule of its text; the
quaintness of its striking portraiture; the unwearied reverence and
patient labour that brought it into being; all of which combined go to
make up the Book of Kells have raised this ancient Irish volume to a
position of abiding preeminence amongst the illuminated manuscripts of
the world.

Here's part of the Gospel of John from The Book of Kells. At the bottom centre, just to the right of the griffin, there's a symbol like a big green C. Sullivan describes its purpose:

The symbol C, known in Irish MSS. as "head under the wing" or
"turn under thepath" ...indicates that the words immediately following it are to be read
after the end of the next full line.

Joyce parodies this at 121.08:

the curious warning sign before our protoparent’s
ipsissima verba (a very pure nondescript, by the way, sometimes
a palmtailed otter, more often the arbutus fruitflowerleaf of the
cainapple) which paleographers call a leak in the thatch or the
aranman ingperwhis through the hole of his hat, indicating that the
words which follow may be taken in any order desired

The most important page for Joyce was this one, called the Tunc page. It illustrates Matthew 27.38 'TUNC CRUCIFIXERANT XPI CUM EO DUOS LATRONES' (then there were crucified with him two thieves). The 'XPI' is the Greek monogram of Christ.

Joyce describes this page on page 122, where he says its design was inspired by the 'cruciform postscript', or kisses on the letter from Boston found in the dump by the hen!Originally there were four kisses (‘with four crosskisses for holy paul holey corner holipoliwhollyisland’ 111.17), but three of them have been scraped away, leaving just one:

then (coming over to the left aisle corner down) the cruciform
postscript from which three basia or shorter and smaller oscula
have been overcarefully scraped away, plainly inspiring the tenebrous Tunc page of the Book of Kells (and then it need not be
lost sight of that there are exactly three squads of candidates for
the crucian rose awaiting their turn in the marginal panels of
Columkiller, chugged in their three ballotboxes, then set apart for
such hanging committees...

If you look at the Tunc page, you can see the three squads of candidates sitting in their ballotboxes. Joyce is drawing a connection between these panels and the three
missing kisses, scraped away from the letter. If you draw lines connecting the
heads of the men in each panel, you do make an X.At the bottom, you can see the big X, which Joyce associated with the surviving kiss on the bottom of his letter.

Sullivan talks about the punctuation of the book at great length. On
page 124, Joyce turns to the punctuation of the letter - the original
document 'showed no signs of punctuation of any sort' (123.33), but if you hold
it up to the light, you can see it's been 'pierced by numerous stabs and gashes
made by a pronged instrument' (124.01-3)

Scotland Yard enquries
suggest that these have been made by a grave professor at the breakfast table with
his fork! By piercing the letter, he’s punctuated it - introducing the notion
of time into something spatial (a 'plane surface'). The exclamation mark after 'punct' is an image of the Professor's fork hovering over the hole it's just made - maybe expressing the paper's surprise at being punctured! (It later turns out that these holes are just the marks of the hen's beak).

The Book of Kells was undated. Sullivan wrote:

Indications to
suggest its time of birth have been sought in all possible directions.
Historical evidence is of little assistance. The Manuscript itself fails us
where, conceivably, it might have helped us most, for the page that should have
told its story is unfortunately no longer there.

The Wake letter is also undated

the studious omission of year number and era name from the
date, the one and only time when our copyist seems at least to have grasped the
beauty of restraint 121.28

Here's Joyce poking fun at himself – the ‘beauty of
restraint’ was completely foreign to the author of Finnegans Wake!

Thursday, 5 December 2013

Joyce's greatest champion while writing Finnegans Wake was Eugene Jolas, who published thirteen extracts from 'Work in Progress' in his avant-garde journal, transition.

In 1932, for an edition of transition marking Joyce's 50th birthday, Jolas got the Spanish artist,César Abin, to do this caricature of him. The comic details were all suggested by Joyce himself.

While many of Joyce's critics rejected 'Work in Progress' as unintelligible, Jolas loved it for that very reason. In 1929, he published a manifesto, The Revolution of the Word, in which he wrote:

THE WRITER EXPRESSES. HE DOES NOT COMMUNICATE.

THE PLAIN READER BE DAMNED.

This was signed by sixteen writers, but not by Joyce. He refused not only because he did not sign manifestos, but also because he believed that he waswriting for the plain reader!

Jolas helps Joyce correct Wake proofs in 1938

No matter what Joyce believed, his association with Jolas and transition led to him being seen as a figurehead of a 'Cult of Unintelligibility'. That's the title of an article written by the socialist writer, Max Eastman,forHarpers in 1929.

Eastman accused Joyce of inventing a private language:

Max Eastman (1883-1969)

James Joyce not only polishes the words that he sets in a row, but moulds and fires them in his own oven. From free grammar he has taken the farther step to free etymology....Joyce is equipped for creative etymology as few men ever were. He has a curious and wide learning in languages and their ways; he has a prodigiously fine ear. You feel that he lives in a world of spoken sounds, through which he goes hearing as a dog goes smelling....The goal towards which he seems to be travelling with all this equipment of genius is the creation of a language of his own — a language which might be superior poetically...to any of the known tongues....But how little would it communicate, and to how few....Until we establish an international bureau for the decoding of our contemporary masterpieces1, I think it will be safe to assert that Joyce's most original contribution to English literature has been to lock up one of its most brilliant geniuses inside of his own vest.

Not long after this article was published, Eastman was in Paris where he visited the Shakespeare & Co bookshop and met Sylvia Beach (publisher of Ulysses). Eastman expected hostility from Beach, but she surprised him by saying, 'Joyce likes your essay in Harper's so much - I wonder if you would have time to take tea with him while you are in Paris.'

Eastman described his subsequent meeting with Joyce in his 1931 book The Literary Mind: Its Place in An Age of Science, which the postman delivered to me this very morning. It's the source of some famous quotations from Joyce, such as 'The demand I make of my reader is that he should devote his whole life to reading my works.' But because the book is hard to find, and it's so fascinating, I've scanned the whole Joyce section. The chapter's title is 'Poets Talking to Themselves'.

1 There is now 'an international bureau for the decoding' of Finnegans Wake - it started in 1962 with Clive Hart and Fritz Senn's Wake Newslitter. The findings were put together in book form by Roland McHugh in three editions of Annotations to Finnegans Wake. Now it's all online in Raphael Slepon's wonderfulfweet website.